The Woman Upstairs (29 page)

“Why did you take yourself?”

“Well, this is the question. Marlene took these …” So Marlene had stood with the camera and recorded Sirena in her nakedness: somehow, for Marlene to do this was fine. “And really, she’s a better photographer than I am.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re very loyal. But the rest of the world thinks so, for a reason. So, if there are reasons to use my body—it’s the right age, I’m the artist, I’m not then asking anyone to do my nakedness for me, if you like …” She sighed. “And in such an installation, this is important, too. I want,
as you say, for everyone to have their own journey in Wonderland, their own life’s journey. But I’m making this art because of where I am in my own life’s journey; so it’s the right thing to do to put my own body here, to show myself in my travels.”

“So why the hesitation?”

“It’s not about my cesarean scar, if that’s what you mean! I’m not ashamed. But it’s also not my photography. To me, this is peculiar, it’s like a shift in perspective, do you see? Am I showing the world through my eyes, or am I showing myself to the world?”

“Well, it depends.”

“
Sì
. It depends. So I must choose. But you must have an opinion?”

My opinion was that her nakedness was beautiful to me, that her body was at once more frail, more childlike, and yet more sturdy than I might have imagined. I hadn’t realized that her olive skin retained a youthful sheen all over, as if she were made of butter: the hip bones either side of her flat stomach were like polished knobs. I hadn’t understood, in all this time, how much higher her left shoulder was than her right. It made me happy to see her crooked tooth peeking when she smiled. “I think it’s a decision you have to make by yourself,” I said.

“Maybe I’ll have a revelation.”

“Couldn’t you use both? One of each?”

“It’s about the symmetry. I could have seven different women, otherwise. But this means more photographs; and I have no time.”

“You could set up one more shoot—”

“No,” she said, and here sounded almost bitter. “This is what Skandar says, as if there were endlessly more time. The gallery wants everything by June first. Already the place that makes the big prints on fabric, for this size, wants six weeks. There aren’t six weeks. Maybe they can rush for me, they say; but if there’s a mistake, or a problem, there’s no room for failure—
there is no room!
” She was very nearly shouting. “And so much to do. The heart, I wanted to cast the plastic heart here, but now it seems, to put in the pump, the best place is in Paris; but it must be done to exact specifications—I’m trying, for early next week, to get a friend of a friend to help me do it here—because I go on Thursday to New York, for the galleries, did you forget? And then I’m
not back until Saturday or maybe Sunday, and another week is lost. Lost, you see?”

“I see.” It was what I was supposed to say.

“It’s not the same for you, you have no deadlines, no commitments, you have all your time, an ocean of time! But for me, it’s always running against the clock. Someone always waiting, Sirena you’re late, you’re late—here, at home, Reza, Skandar, the fucking babysitter, the gallery in Paris shouting down the telephone—it’s always too much. And this show—it’s very important, it’s my chance. I’m getting older, and yes, there are the beginnings, I’ve had nice attention, but each time it only matters more. If I fail, it will be the end. Each time this is only more true. Unless I can really climb over the wall. I have to, this time. This matters so much.”

“I see,” I said again. I don’t need to tell you that she was flaying me alive.

“So, no more pictures. I’ll choose one or the other, by tonight. Maybe I’ll choose blind and see what comes back.” She gave a harsh laugh and daubed at her eyes. She’d gotten quite worked up. No, of course I wouldn’t know what it was to have a chance, or a life, at all. “So, we haven’t quite finished with the photographs. There’s still my wise woman, and hers are the best.”

“I’d better go in a minute.”

“No—you came to do your work. I’m sorry, to get all worked up—I’m so tired. I’m overwhelmed. My dear friend, look quickly at the photos, and then go to your work—I know you haven’t been at your table for many days now. I just want you to see my prize, the best ones.”

They were indeed, in spite of the glory of the others, the best ones. Sirena explained that the woman, aged eighty-three, was in her yoga class. She was herself a painter, as it turned out, and a child therapist who, although officially retired, still consulted. She was widowed. She had no children. Her name, not that it mattered, was Rose.

In these photos, we saw all of Rose. She had bunioned feet and fingers so badly warped by arthritis that you wondered how she could hold a pen. She had, on her diminished right breast, the white scar of a lumpectomy—breast cancer at fifty-eight—but it was barely noticeable,
really. Her breasts were Tiresian withered dugs, like the breasts of native women in my history classes, breasts so far from either the erotic or the maternal that they could barely be called breasts, were more like near-empty sacks appended to her rib cage. Her skeleton was everywhere visible, almost protruding: her breastbone shimmered beneath the skin’s surface, like the shadow of mortality; her ribs; the odd, jaunty poke of her uneven hips; the knobbling of her knees … And this in spite of her amazing freckling: her skin was everywhere so mottled that you couldn’t tell foreground from background. Not the gentle smattering of moles that sprayed the young woman’s neck like kisses—Rose had a Jackson Pollock for a body, a human casing as marked as any canvas, so intense that she almost seemed dressed in her nudity. I loved that in all this, her fingernails and toenails were carefully painted, not garishly but deliberately, shell pink, an old lady’s vanity.

But ah, to see her face! After the faceless bodies of the others, to be given the gift of her face all but brought tears to my eyes. And such a face. As freckled as, or more so than, the rest of her, her pigment a mask, her wrinkles almost folds, but here, here, the spirit shone. Her pale blue eyes glittered clear, and fierce, and resoundingly joyous. Her strong, compact nose broke the ocean of her face like a ship’s prow. Her teeth, so white, reassuringly crooked. And her pure white hair, oiled and straight, impeccably parted and pulled back from her face, glowed.

In one of the two images Sirena had chosen, Rose was dancing, half a twirl, in an almost-echo of Sana’s dervish spin. In the other, the most beautiful of all the photographs, she held out both her arms to the camera, as if to a child, with a smile at once welcoming and conspiratorial, as if saying, “Come, come, and I will show you all the wonders that I know.”

You couldn’t look at Rose in her nakedness with envy, or contempt, or even sorrow: I looked at her with awe, and I thought, “Let me come with you.”

And then I thought, in spite of my fury at Sirena just then, that if she did nothing else at all for her installation, if Wonderland were only that photograph, she would have made a beautiful and inspiring thing. I thought that Marlene had been right, this would be the making of
her. She hadn’t needed me to sew together the canopy of Alice dresses; she didn’t need the aspirin flowers or the broken mirrors—all of it, ultimately, otiose, however clever or beautiful. This was the real moment: this was her Wonderland.

“These are fantastic” is all I said. And she laid her hand on my arm, that way, and really looked at me, and said, “Thank you.”

11

The next week, Sirena went to New York, although not before we’d confirmed our Appleton adventure for the Monday almost two weeks hence, in the afternoon. We’d bring all the kids, but she’d film only the ones whose parents agreed it was okay. For the others, I’d provide an art project, at my end of the studio. I prepared the permission forms with two sections, and sent them home to all the parents.

In the end, Sirena would choose Anna Z as her gallerist, in what seemed at the time a bold, even risky choice—would the gallery even survive? Who knew?—but over the past years, even through the difficult times, they’ve both thrived, and the success of each has fed the other, so that now Anna is credited with having “found” Sirena, and Sirena, perhaps more accurately, with having “made” Anna.

But that was for later. Sirena was gone. Obviously, I’d known she would be. I hadn’t been at my boxes for over a week, although it felt much longer. I’d been so firmly put in my place during those days. I’d barely resisted the impulse to tear up my Polaroids—who had I thought I was? How could I have borne for anyone else to see?—but still I couldn’t look at them. I’d stuffed them in the back of my underwear drawer, as if they were racy porn, instead of sad and tame. Not only did I feel ashamed, I felt ashamed of being ashamed. Neither Alice nor Edie would have had time or patience for my prudery, silly cow that I was. The point was to be good at it—at art—and not to care. It wasn’t
clear which of these was the more important, or whether simply in caring one fell at a crucial hurdle. Would it have been better not to be good and not to care? Obviously, above all—I had Rose in her splendid nudity in my mind’s eye—it was important to be good. Sirena, fuck her, was good.

But that, I told myself, was no reason to abandon my artists and their habitats.
They
were good, even if I wasn’t especially—doubt! Doubt! The enemy of all life!—and I owed it to them: so when Sirena was away, I went into the studio on Thursday and again on Friday, and stayed late into the night, to select and carefully to frame under glass the perfect reduced prints of Edie that, once installed, would look down upon her in her sealed room. Even as I filed and measured and glued, I thought: What are these images, even? They aren’t new. They don’t, as Pound so wanted,
make it new
. A magpie cobbling, they don’t owe anything to my own efforts. Or rather: given how labor-intensive my efforts were, my failure of effort was something bigger, somehow more grandiose, a failure that I could sense, like a blind person, but couldn’t properly identify.

But why, I asked at the same time, why judge what wasn’t yet made, not yet fully itself? The dioramas aren’t in competition with anyone, with anything; they’re your expression. Yours.

Yours? How can they be
yours
, when they’re simply primitive homages to actual great artists of one kind or another?

But as a sequence, they have a logic—

And that logic is entirely subsidiary. It’s a follower’s logic.

But aren’t we—most of us—followers?

But do we want to be? Surely a work of art isn’t simply about what
is
? Do you leave a door open for what could be, what we want to be?

Even as I filed and measured and glued, I was thinking more about Sana twirling, or the girl-child reaching, or Rose embracing, than I was about my own work. I was thinking about the intimations of monstrosity in Sirena’s world, about the Jabberwock eyes, and of the film she proposed to make of the children, and of what, exactly, it might be like.

It was around ten o’clock on Friday night that I became aware, as months before, of footsteps in the corridor, of a shuffling pause on the threshold, before the inevitable knock. It was warm, and I had all the windows open, so that the rustling of the leaves outside was like a voice, whispering, and it was so calm, and astoundingly I found that I was also calm, or almost. I didn’t grab for my X-Acto knife, or bead with sweat. Besides, I recognized the knock. “Who is it?” I called, as I walked to the door; and in response, again, the particular knock.

Skandar stood outside, a smattering of greenery on one shoulder of his messy suit jacket, as though he’d walked through a bush.

“Hey.” I smiled. I couldn’t help it. I felt a surge of something so strong it was almost like being sick. “Wow.”

“I was at a supper, not far away. Some Lebanese graduate students, talking a lot. Near Davis Square.” He wore the goofy smile, and surely had had a few drinks. He was carrying a paper bag. “I thought you might need a break,” he said. “I thought either a drink or a walk. So I brought a bottle of wine—it’s red, I think you like red?—and I brought—” He looked down.

“Your shoes.”

“Yes. I brought my shoes. Which I will need if we go for a walk.”

“Certainly around here,” I said, taking the bottle out of the bag. “Come on in.”

He was diffident, almost shy, his manner very different from that of his first visit, when he’d behaved as though he were my host, rather than the other way around.

“Sit down,” I said, pointing to his wife’s cushions. “I’ll get a couple of glasses.” There were only coffee cups in sight, those pretty, chipped ones, so emphatically hers. I poured red wine into two of them, and felt alluringly bohemian doing so, and wondered how much I owed to her any bohemianism, and any allure, I might have. But just then it didn’t matter. Even the thought was an anticipation of guilt. I hoped he wouldn’t comment on the cups. He didn’t.

“So,” he said, frankly sheepish. “So. Thank you.”

“Thank
you
.” I raised my cup in salute, drank. I was touched by his awkwardness, and by my own. There was silence for a short while, because all I could think of to say was “Who’s with Reza?” or “What
news from Sirena?” and these were both things I didn’t want to say. He was looking at me, in this time, very still, like a cat. I wondered briefly how much he might have had to drink.